Non-Human Identity Governance: Why IGA Falls Short

Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) has long been a pillar of access management. It works well for employees and contractors whose identities are anchored in HR systems, follow predictable lifecycles, and change relatively slowly. In those environments, organizations have historically been willing to accept longer deployment timelines and heavier integration work in exchange for centralized control.

But the identity landscape has changed.

Today, the majority of identities operating inside modern environments are non-human: service accounts, cloud service principals, automation bots, and increasingly, autonomous AI agents. These identities operate continuously, authenticate using secrets rather than passwords, and are created dynamically by platforms, pipelines, and integrations rather than centralized workflows.

Treating them like people introduces blind spots that governance teams can no longer afford.

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The Fundamental Mismatch: Human Identity vs. Machine Reality

IGA platforms were designed around a core assumption: identities represent people.

Human identities have clear authoritative sources, relatively stable attributes, and predictable joiner–mover–leaver events. Even when access becomes complex, there is usually enough organizational context for reviewers to reason about intent and necessity.

Non-human identities (NHIs) violate nearly all of these assumptions. They may be created ad hoc by any line of the business, initiated in cloud platforms, or generated by automation tools. Ownership is often unclear or distributed across teams. Access changes frequently as systems evolve. 

The Joiner -> Mover -> Leaver lifecycle of a human identity simply does not apply. Attempts to force these identities into human-oriented governance models often introduce friction without clarity, requiring manual ownership assignments and review workflows that are difficult to sustain.

Why Is Context Critical for Governing NHIs?

Traditional IGA models see access as a relationship between identities and resources. That abstraction works for humans because much of the necessary context already exists in business systems.

For NHIs, context must be derived from runtime behavior.

NHI access events follow a common pattern: an application, service, workload, or AI agent initiates an action, authenticates using a secret, binds to an identity, and accesses a resource. None of these elements are meaningful in isolation. For NHIs, the chain of relationships is the context.

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Why Don’t Access Reviews Work for Non-Human Identities?

Access reviews were designed to answer a human-centric question: does this person still need this access?

For non-human identities, the questions are different. 

• Is the identity still in use? What depends on it? 
• What data does it touch? 
• What would break if it were changed or removed? 
• What damage could it do if compromised?
• Who owns it and what is the business justification?

IGA platforms typically try to answer these questions through scheduled certifications: monthly, quarterly, or annually. That cadence may satisfy audit requirements, but it does not align with least privilege or how machine access actually changes. Deployments, configuration updates, and automation occur continuously, not on a review schedule.

Without consumer and usage context, reviewers are forced to guess. The result is rubber-stamping, reviewer fatigue, and growing auditor skepticism—not because reviews are missing, but because they lack substance.

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What Does Continuous NHI Governance Look Like?

Non-human identities often outnumber human users by orders of magnitude. Applying manual, human-oriented attestation processes at that scale is operationally unsustainable.

A more effective model treats attestation as continuous validation rather than periodic approval. After an identity is created, governance shifts to policy-driven enforcement informed by real usage and dependency data. This includes identifying over-privileged identities, rotating credentials when risk changes, flagging unused access, and safely decommissioning identities when their consumers are retired.

In this model, accountability is established through observable behavior rather than forced sign-offs.

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How Do You Govern Agentic AI Access?

The rise of agentic AI accelerates these challenges further. Autonomous agents can initiate actions, chain tasks, and access multiple systems without direct human oversight. Access decisions are influenced not just by identity, but by intent—what the agent is being asked to do in a given moment.

Static roles, attributes, and scheduled reviews cannot reason about prompts or intent. Governing these systems requires contextual, execution-time controls that extend beyond traditional identity models.

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Where Oasis Fits

IGA platforms remain essential for governing human access. Oasis complements them by addressing the identities they were never designed to manage.

Rather than extending human-centric models, Oasis governs non-human identities across their full lifecycle—from creation to decommissioning—using contextual intelligence derived from how identities are actually used in production. 

Oasis also helps organizations address the next phase of identity risk as the workforce expands to include agentic AI, where access decisions are driven by intent, execution context, and continuous behavior rather than fixed roles. 

By integrating with identity providers, logs, and EDR rather than relying on per-application connectors, Oasis delivers faster time to value without the integration burden that often slows traditional governance programs.

The result is comprehensive governance that harnesses AI innovation and reduces your operational overhead along with your risk.